Graham Curtis's outline of the features that a product must have to be sold on the Internet.

Other opportunities to airlines, in terms of marketing, as a result of the internet.

E-commerce and the dramatic increase in competition between firms.

Conclusion.

Bibliography.

In 2006, the total e-commerce spending by customers and businesses would reach and even surpass five trillion Dollars according to e-marketer (2004). This astonishing number confirms that e-commerce and e-business must be taken into consideration now by firms in order to be competitive. Even if e-commerce and e-business seem to be rather new phenomena for customers, that is to say clients have not been used to buy online for a long time; the Internet has already a long history. In the late sixties (1969), the American department of defence created ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) group in order to install secure networks among computers. In 1973, Great Britain is connected to ARPANET. Then in 1984, JANET: joint academic network, is installed in United Kingdom. But the big step is the introduction in 1990 of the World Wide Web, which is considered to be one of the most significant contributions to business activity. By the end of 1992, the Internet and the World Wide Web have already more than one million users over the world.

[...] Indeed firms have to cope with a strong competition that the Internet has increased with the low cost airlines. But there is not only a price challenge, e-commerce is also challenging in other ways. Indeed, firms have to prove their reliability in order to reassure clients about their privacy and the security of the web payments. So their image and organisation are very important and sometimes they have to overhaul their entire way of working. One of the keys of success is that before embarking on e-business initiatives managers have to identify clearly the organizational changes required to make them work. [...]

[...] Now we wonder what the opportunities the Internet had brought for airlines industry are. The opportunities linked with the rise of the Internet are numerous; indeed there are opportunities in term of costs, marketing and geographical boundaries. First of all Graham Curtis et al[8] outline the features that a product must have in order to be sold on the Internet, these are: the product needs no advice from the seller, the name of the desired choice is not ambiguous, the product can be sent easily, there are no differences of quality between products from one seller and another. [...]

[...] That is why it could be relevant to review the opportunities and challenges that the Internet had brought to the transport sector and especially airlines. First of all, we will try to delimit the terms and the context, and then we will review the opportunities the Internet had brought to this sector and eventually the challenges. First, we are going to delimit what e-commerce really is, the same for e-business, and then through a historic perspective we will study what is at stake for the airline industry. [...]